ASSESSMENT OF CHROMATIC ABERRATIONS FOR GOPRO 3 CAMERAS IN UNDERWATER ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract. With underwater photogrammetric mapping becoming more prominent due to the lower costs for waterproof cameras as well as lower costs for underwater platforms, the aim of this research is to investigate chromatic aberration in underwater environments. Chromatic aberration in in-air applications is to be known to systematically influence the observations of up to a few pixels. In order to achieve pixel-level positioning accuracy, this systematic influence needs further investigation. However, while chromatic aberration studies have been performed for in-air environments, there is a lack of research to quantify the influence of chromatic aberration in underwater environments. Using images captured in a water tank from three different GoPro cameras in five datasets, we investigate possible chromatic aberration by running two different adjustments on the extracted red (R), green (G) and blue (B) bands. The first adjustment is an adjustment that calculates the interior orientation parameters for each set of images independently in a free network adjustment. The second adjustment solves for all interior orientation parameters (for R, G, and B channels) in a combined adjustment per camera, constraining the point observations in object space. We were able to quantify significant chromatic aberrations in our evaluation, with the largest aberrations observed for red band followed by green and blue.